Typhoon in a Cocktail Glass

So Amazon, having grabbed with all hands at the streaming market, is also going after the Wattpad market for serial fiction with their new product Kindle Vella.

I think the business model is suspect, the terms murky, the future bleak. But I am still tempted because serial writing might be something I need to break some bad habits.

Trouble is, the thing at the top of my work list (once I am at a convenient place in the Athena Fox stories) is The Tiki Stars. I hadn't intended it to be serial in form. It could be. But more importantly, there's a bunch of world building to do.

(And not the fun kind of world building, the "auto-generate lists of planets" stuff that neophytes seem to think is the bulk of it. No, this is the "how does this place work and what am I trying to say with it?" stuff. But that's a rant for another post.)

The even more serial in form is the idea I've bruited about of Weird War II. You know the basic form; supernatural and magi-tech crossed with more-or-less historical fiction. Except I decided I wanted to move away from the familiar battlegrounds and the standard hard-bitten (shell-shocked) frontline grunts.

On the plus side, I could pretty much start now, merely hint at any underlying mythos, and stop if nobody is reading. On the minus side...more historical fiction! (Plus, military fiction, which is a field where people really, really get cranky if you get the details wrong).

Well, I slammed through four thousand words over the last couple of days on the book I'm supposed to be writing, and most of the next chapters are already mapped out and fully researched. I have hopes now of finishing the draft by mid-June.